Suzanne Collins

In 2013, authors Walter Dean Myers and Suzanne Collins came to the Scholastic Auditorium for a conversation about writing war stories for readers of all ages. The following is an edited transcript of this illuminating conversation, which was introduced by Walter Dean Myers's editor, Andrea Davis Pinkney, and moderated by Suzanne Collins's publisher, David Levithan.

 

 

 

 

Andrea Davis Pinkney: We're here to talk about a topic that can be very unsettling, and that is the topic of war. And we're going to explore the complexities of war through the work and wisdom of two great literary thinkers:

Suzanne Collins, author of the groundbreaking Hunger Games Trilogy and the bestselling Underland Chronicles, breaks ground again, looking at war in her extraordinary new picture book entitled Year of the Jungle, which is illustrated by James Proimos.

Walter Dean Myers, the 2012–2013 National Ambassador For Young People's Literature and a critically acclaimed bestselling author of more than 100 books for children and young adults, delves into war in his new novel, Invasion, the companion to his classic war novels Fallen Angels and Sunrise Over Fallujah.

 

 

David Levithan: Walter, Invasion is the extraordinary prequel to two classic war novels, Fallen Angels, which is about Vietnam, and Sunrise Over Fallujah, which is about Iraq.  What made you want to write a prequel, and what did you decide to write about?

 

Walter Dean Myers: Well, most of my life there's been some kind of a war going on.  When I was a kid, it was Vietnam. I went up to join the Army on my seventeenth birthday, you know?  Because I thought it was a good idea and I had these romantic ideas about war.

Then my brother came in and he was killed in Vietnam.  And then with Iraq, my son was in Iraq . . . and every day you're worried.  Every time the phone rings at night, you're worried about this.  But I kept seeing these romanticized versions of war; I kept seeing war being displayed as distant from the humanity that was actually fighting in the wars.

And so I can't go away from it.  My interest is there.  I want to look at war in a very realistic sense, and I think that young people need to do this because young people who read Fallen Angels are the generation that's now making the decisions about modern wars. We need to bring them to that concept of, Yes, I know something about war, and it's about the human costs. 

 

DL: So you decided to focus on Normandy and World War II. 

 

WDM: The idea of Normandy has been, It was a bad day, but we won, and we got to the beaches, and we won.  Many of the people that I interviewed recounted that.  But there were bad days that followed.

I mean it took the Americans and the Canadians and the Brits twenty-five days to go twenty-five miles, and at a terrible, terrible cost. 

 

DL: How was writing about World War II different than writing about Vietnam or the Iraqi War? 

 

WDM: I was a child.  War meant the bad guys were someplace, doing something.  But for me one of the differences was that I married a German lady, and I began listening to her relatives, what they were saying about how they got into the army, and what it meant to face the Americans.

And that was so human.  So human. 

 

DL: One of the amazing things about the book is the detail and how you really feel like you were there, not just on the beach, but as you said, in that month afterwards, and sloughing through.

And you do even have a moment — one of my favorite scenes in the book — where you're really seeing it from the German point of view as well, through the interrogation of a prisoner.  So I'm curious about the research you did to sort of get into the heads of these soldiers. 

 

WDM: Well, the research was different with this book, because with the Vietnam book, that was my war, I was in the army during that time — with the Iraq thing, my son was there, and I could talk to men.  But for this book, I'm interviewing guys in their eighties, and I normally like to interview people three times.

The first time is to sort of get their minds going; the second time, digging a little deeper.  And so there were guys I'm talking to with this book, in their late eighties, crying to me, actually crying as they live, relive those memories. 

 

DL: Suzanne, your research for Year of the Jungle was obviously of a more personal nature, since you had to go back to your six-year-old self as well as your family to explore the year your father was deployed to Vietnam.  What was that like, to excavate that part of your past? 

 

Suzanne Collins: Well, a few weeks ago Jim [illustrator James Proimos] and I were doing some short book trailers for this, and the director sent a list with a breakdown, and he said, "This is the part where Suzanne will show the artifacts," and what he meant was things from my childhood. It made me feel like a mummy or something. But then I thought, No, it was forty-five years ago, and especially for a child, it might as well be five thousand years ago. It is a thing now set in history, even though it was part of my early childhood. 

Because that year was so emotional and so intense, even common objects took on a different kind of significance. So I have a thermos I mentioned in the book, which is like a Junior Miss thermos from 1968.  And I have a beautiful Vietnamese doll that my dad sent me, as well as the postcards he sent.

In terms of interviews I called my brother and sisters and my mom. I'd been very little during the time, but they shared certain memories with me as well.

So that was really my research. Unlike some other books, in which I do delve into historic research to use it as models for certain parts in the series, this was all very personal. 

 

DL: Walter, you were talking before about how you enlisted when you were seventeen. Your brother died in Vietnam, your son was in the army. How does that affect how you write about war? 

 

WDM: Well, you know, it has an amazing effect because what I see as I look at war, I see the numbers of people being killed. My son that was in Iraq was a trauma counselor, and he would tell me stories about these men going through this trauma. While they were in the army and while they were out of the army.

And I'm saying, why am I not getting this on the news? Why this distance between what was going on in the lives of the people, the humanity of the people, and what I'm picking up every day in the news?  And this just bothers me, it eats at me. And I don't want this idea to continue.

You know, I'm seeing it more and more. I'm seeing, during the Iraq War, we first got the idea of smart bombs. You know, a bomb's not smart; it kills people. It kills people. War's about killing people, killing strangers, killing people you're not angry with.

But smart bombs sounds like, "Oh, this is a smart bomb; this is only going to hit the bad guy. You know, the bad guy's going to be having a beer; bam, it's gonna get him." Now we're talking about cyber war.

It makes it sound like a game. Or we're talking about drones. Drones kill people.  And as young people are given these ideas — "Oh, it's a drone, it's a cyber war, you go to your computer, you do this, you do the other thing" — I've seen pictures of guys in I think Florida or someplace like this, and they're shooting off drones in the Middle East, and I'm saying, "What does a kid think about this war?  Is it real to them?  Is it real?"

I felt driven to make it real. You have to write about war in a way that expresses the humanity of it. You know, we're talking about postcards. That's real, and that's a postcard from a far-off place and represents so much. I have Mass cards, the German soldiers would have when someone in the family was killed, and they'd carry the Mass cards around. That's real. 

 

DL: Suzanne, for you, obviously the through line between growing up in a military family in this book is obvious, but do you think that's really guided you for your other books as well? 

 

SC: Oh yeah. I mean, my father, along with being a Vietnam veteran, was also career Air Force.  He was a doctor of political science, and he was a military historian.  And when he came back from Vietnam — I'm sure he had been educating us all along — but after he had experienced that war firsthand, he came back, I think, with almost an obsession to educate his children about war.

So from a very early age, he did just that.  He told us stories, he took us to battlefields. We went to memorials, and it was all very integrated into our lives. And because of that, because I learned about it so young, I think it seems very natural for me to write about this for children of any age. I don't think that I would have that if I had gone through basically the normal American education system, where we really ignore a lot of war, and skirt around a lot of things, and wave a patriotic flag about a lot of other things.

You don't really get to the heart or the truth of what's going on. So I think it was an education that was rather unique that led to writing these books about war.

 

DL: Both of you are fairly unique in that you've now written about war in picture books for young kids, novels for elementary school kids, and then novels for young adults. How do you approach that? 

 

WDM: I just want to remove the romantic notions. You know, I grew up on the romance of war. "Into the valley of death rode the six hundred."  You know.  [laughs]  "I could do that." You know. "Wherever I fall, there lies a bit of England." I read all that stuff, you know, and I saw all the movies when I was a kid.

Even today you have the movies wherein you know the good guy is not gonna die, the star is not gonna die, and people get hit in the movies, they fall nicely and they go, "Oh, oh." It's not like that. People scream and yell, and you know, it's horrendous.

So I don't want to have any kid turn against the country because we're involved in wars, but just know what you're getting into. 

The same kids who picked up that copy at fifteen of Fallen Angels are now forty years old. Lord, time flies. [laughter] But they're the ones who are making the decisions, and they need to know the truth, and they need to learn it early. 

 

DL: I think the wonderful thing about the books is the context that you give. You were talking earlier to us about a letter you got about Fallen Angels. 

 

WDM: Nicest letter I've ever received in my life. The Iraq War had broken out, and there was so much flag-waving and gung-ho stuff, and this woman wrote to me and she said that her son wanted to quit school and join the army. She says, "I begged him, I had tears in my eyes. You know, at least finish high school," and he said okay, he'd finish high school, but he was ready to go.

And what he did was he read every war book he could, and he read Fallen Angels and he changed his mind. The mother just thanked me and thanked me and thanked me. You know, I'll never see her, but I know she's out there; I know the boy's out there. 

 

SC: Yes. Whether you decide to enlist or not, I think that one of Walter's books should be mandatory reading. You should read one before you go, so that you don't get caught up in a lot of idealism, so you have some sense of what you might be entering. 

 

DL: And in your books, looking at Year of the Jungle, then The Underland Chronicles, then The Hunger Games, there's a progression— 

 

SC: In Year of the Jungle, the main character Suzy is six. In The Underland Chronicles it begins when Gregor's eleven, and in The Hunger Games Katniss is sixteen. So you're entering with a protagonist who's the age of the audience, or somewhere in the vicinity.

There's also a sort of philosophical progression about what I'm asking the audience to think about. If I had to take thirty-five years of my father's war tutelage that I experienced and boil it down into one question, it would involve the issue of whether something is a necessary or an unnecessary war, and the very high bar of being a necessary war. The picture book is a story of the home front, and the main character gets the concept of what a war is. So we begin there.

The Underland Chronicles deals with the concept of an unnecessary war. It's five books. And until you're about into the fourth book, there's no reason the war couldn't be avoided, and it's simply because of anger and greed and hatred and bad decision-making that they're propelled into a necessary war, probably by the time that there's genocide. And then in the fifth book it results in a huge, very bloody Underland global war. 

When I got to the YA, I thought, Now is where you begin with a concept of the necessary war, the war which, by our standards today, is accepted. It's said, "If X, Y, and Z happens to you, then it's just for you to wage war." So at the beginning of The Hunger Games you have Panem, a country in which the people are horribly oppressed, and the symbol of this is the Hunger Games, in which these children are forced to fight to the death.

But even that is not that simple, because of the arena, which is a symbol that transforms throughout the three books. In the first book it is simply a gladiator game; in the second it becomes the hotbed of the revolution. And by the third, when they're actually in the war, the arena is the Capitol, and they've come full circle. And all the things that were wrong, that propelled them into the necessary war that were going on in the original arena in The Hunger Games are now occurring in Mockingjay, except they're happening on a battlefield. Nothing has, in fact, been resolved. They've just brought themselves full circle, and because they've done that, nobody is safe. 

 

DL: So why write about war? Do you feel that you have a choice? You keep coming back to the subject over and over again. What's the passion behind that? 

 

WDM: I keep coming back to it because we keep going, we keep having wars. As Suzanne was saying, you keep asking yourself, Is this war necessary?  And, you know, the reason that we have wars is that people make bad decisions, but we allow them to make bad decisions. You know, nobody wants to stand up and say, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute," and somebody has to do that.

The book community has to do that. Librarians have to do that. We have to say, "Wait a minute." I was looking the other day about the drones; I said, "Oh, this is so bad, this is so bad, because this is going to lead to bad decisions. This is going to lead to the company that makes the drones, they'll be making the decisions, and the people who make the smart bombs will be making decisions," and we need readers, we need people who are thinking, and we need people to say, "Wait a minute."

You know, I spend a lot of time in prisons, juvenile prisons, and one of the things that I always know about juvenile prisons is if the guys had been over the problems before acting, they would've made different decisions. And it's the same thing with wars. If they would go over the problems and understand what's going on, their decisions would be different.

I feel compelled to write about that. 

 

SC: And I think you can say, "Well, there are all these amazing war books that came ahead of you," and it's true, there are, but it seems that the stories need to be refreshed for every generation. You know, because you'll get something like All Quiet on the Western Front, and it seems like that should've been it, no more war. And it's not so much, I think, that you think you're going to write the book that ends war; it's more that you feel like you're part of a continuum, that the discussion has to be kept on the table. 

If not, will we backslide even further? There's a sort of responsibility to keep the subject alive and make it new, and I think writing for younger audiences, you have even more of an opportunity to do that. 

 

DL: Let's talk about the void in other parts of the culture in discussing war. We were talking earlier about just how it is not a topic that's very much on people's minds, and you can easily sort of shunt it away and not pay attention to it.

I think it's interesting that these books really do force you to. Look at how it operates with war and the media –

 

SC: Right. I mean the initial idea for The Hunger Games came when I was channel surfing through television, and there was a reality program, and then there was footage of the Iraq War, although it is not the footage that, you know, you're talking about from Vietnam, because they don't show that kind of footage anymore. 

 

WDM:   Right, right.

 

SC: And then you hit the button again and you're on a cooking show, and then there's a baseball game. We're so inundated with information and with options of things to view right now, it becomes very difficult to distinguish. The footage you saw in Iraq is, for one thing, not entertainment. It's something real and very serious going on, and lives are being lost. But there's a real desensitization to people, because we're so overloaded with imagery.

When I was a child, when Year of the Jungle was going on, we had, I think, four channels in black and white. And when the news was on, you knew it was the news; there wasn't any confusion. And there weren't a million other images coming to you from other places.

We've been at war going on twelve years now, and although much lip service is paid to the contrary, there's a really small segment of our population — the military families — who are utterly bearing the brunt of this, and in many ways are very isolated.

I don't feel that we feel as if we're a nation at war, but we should all hold equal responsibility in that. At the time of Year of the Jungle, we did not live on a military base; I did not know anybody else that had a parent in Vietnam. In situations like that, you're isolated, and you're going through a very difficult time without support. And of course Vietnam was not a popular war. 

 

WDM: You also have to remember that one of the things that eroded the support for the Vietnam War were the images on television. And after that, the government understood that, and there were not those images for the Iraq War, and there are not those images for today's war, and there's not those images for all of these young people who are being traumatized.

I know that I was shocked when they had the Paralympics, and all these young people with artificial limbs. We weren't seeing those on television. You know, that story was not being told. Suzanne and I are trying to tell that story. 

 

DL: It's been twenty-five years since Fallen Angels came out, and obviously time has passed, it's a different kind of war. So what themes do you find keep recurring and what things do you think are unique for now? 

 

WDM: If you're ever in a war zone and you see bodies, if you smell the bodies, you begin to rethink what war's about. And I really think that the excitement that we try to reach out and generate among very young kids, war games and stuff like this, it goes on and on and on, hiding the horrors of war behind this huge mask, sometimes of patriotism; more recently, just by censorship. 

 

SC: Right. And having a realistic sense and an education about war is essential on so many levels. If you don't even have an idea of what propaganda is, how will you know when it's being used against you? How will you know to question a government, to question the information that's being fed to you? You won't know, because you won't have any background to know that you should have alarms going off when certain things are said.

And then lastly — and Walter alluded to this — the young people of today are the ones that we'll be looking to, hopefully, in the future, to come up with nonviolent means of conflict resolution. If they don't understand conflict, if they don't really understand the nature of war and its cost and what it means and what it's meant historically, if they have no sense of it other than the romanticized movies or whatever they've seen, how can we expect them to have a clue about how they might come up with solutions for it? 

 

WDM: Yeah. 

 

DL: Well, I, luckily, feel I can end on a note of hope, because I think we can see what literature and stories can do.

I love the fact that the seventeen-year-old who joined the army because of poetry and grandiose notions of war now writes novels that seventeen-year-olds read and decide not to go to war.

And the six-year-old who didn't know what war was, and was so just confused by what was going on, has grown up to write a book for six-year-olds, explaining what's going on. I think there's some beauty in that, and in the hope that we can actually improve things, which I hope we can.

Thank you, Walter and Suzanne.